Google Adding / Manipulating Page Meta Titles?
-
We have a client who is experiencing some heavy google modification to the title tags being displayed on the search engine. It is adding "- 0 Reviews" to an ecommerce site. Obviously a bad start. There were no instances of these keywords anywhere on any of these pages, header tag or otherwise (on only a handful of the affected pages there was a single commented out image with an alt tag 0 reviews - but it was commented out and since removed) We have attempted to rewrite the title multiple times and it will modify the title but still include the non-relevant addition. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this?
-
For a while, Google has been auto-appending brand names (or their best guess) in that "Title Goes Here - Brand" style, even when "- Brand" isn't in the title tag. There's no way to tell them not to do that, unfortunately. When they launched the redesign to the wider column, it seems like title rewriting increased, IMO.
So, the weird question here, clearly, is why does Google think your company is called "0 Reviews"? It could be an old legacy bit of bad data somewhere, like DMOZ (as Russ said), or it could be something they're seeing on-page or in inbound anchor text. Unfortunately, without being able to see the site, this kind of thing is really tough to diagnosis.
-
The only thing I would add to what Russ says is to check the length of your page titles. Google seems more likely to modify overly long or short page titles. We've had some success getting Google to stop modifying the page title by writing our own page title that was the ideal length.
Another thought: do you have schema.org or other reviews markup on the page? I wonder if Google is pulling the "0 reviews" from that.
At the end of the day, Google gets to decide how to display your page title, which can be frustrating!
-
Google has often taken liberty with the title tags as displayed in the SERPs, drawing from varied sources including content on the page, named entities, DMOZ titles, anchor text of links pointing to the page, etc. The only thing you can do is try and create meaningful, relevant, optimized and sufficiently unique titles that attract users such that Google doesn't try and switch them out.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Site appearing and disappearing from google serps.
Hi, My website is normally on page 2-3 on google consistently. Over the past month it has been appearing and then completely disappearing from the serps. One day it will be on page 2, then the next day completely missing from the serps. When i check the index it seems to be indexed correctly when doing site:mysite.com. I don't understand why this keeps happening, any experience with this issue? It doesn't seem to be a google dance as far as I can tell. When my other sites dance they typically just go up or down a few ranks for a couple weeks until they stabilize. Not completely fall off the search engine.
Algorithm Updates | | Chris_www0 -
Need only tens of pages to be indexed out of hundreds: Robots.txt is Okay for Google to proceed with?
Hi all, We 2 sub domains with hundreds of pages where we need only 50 pages to get indexed which are important. Unfortunately the CMS of these sub domains is very old and not supporting "noindex" tag to be deployed on page level. So we are planning to block the entire sites from robots.txt and allow the 50 pages needed. But we are not sure if this is the right approach as Google been suggesting to depend mostly on "noindex" than robots.txt. Please suggest whether we can proceed with robots.txt file. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Have AMP pages on Chrome disappeared?
Hi, We amplified our site the other day and Google was quick to find our AMP pages. Today, we can´t seem to find any AMP pages on Chrome and it looks like we can´t find any other pages from sites like Wapo and so forth. They´re still visible on Safari. We are searching from Iceland. Is anyone experiencing this and if so, could you please share a link to the news? Thanks and have a nice day!
Algorithm Updates | | guidetoiceland0 -
Translate page?
Hi Guy's I have a question about Google asking me to translate the page when i search on brandname. It's in the Dutch Google and the searchquery is: "rotomshop" I can find why Google wants to translate the page because all our settings are Dutch. Does anyone have a suggestion? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | Happy-SEO1 -
ALL CAPS in title
What's the latest from Google (and others) when using all caps in part of a page title, for example, "Custom-engineered Valves | MOGAS". This is how we've presented titles the past 7 years, but since we're updating the site and touching everything we'd prefer to keep consistent branding... the owner's name is Mogas, but we brand the company as MOGAS. Thoughts?
Algorithm Updates | | SteveMauldin0 -
Meta Keyword Tags
What is the word on Meta Keyword Tags? Are they good to have, or bad? Our biggest competitor seems to have them.
Algorithm Updates | | Essential-Pest0 -
How to you get a company details to appear on the right side of google searches? For example is you type dr martens in google , the search page shows links and then a snippet of the company on the right. Thank you.
For example is you type dr martens in google , the search page shows links and then a snippet of the company on the right. Thank you. https://www.google.com/search?q=dr+martens&oq=dr+martens&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2176j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8
Algorithm Updates | | vijayvasu0 -
Meta Description / Meta Keywords
So, I am using Wordpress and the seo by yoast..... I have heard that meta keywords and descriptions are no longer recognized or used by search engines with respect to page rankings in the serps. Is this true? If so, why do people still recommend using these? I thought content is king these days?
Algorithm Updates | | APICDA0